The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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I've done the most clichéd thing ever and bought a gym membership in the first week of the new year, and I'm looking for suggestions for exercises and routines to follow.
My main motivations for working out are to improve my mood, and vanity. I'm not interested in getting "huge" or "shredded", but I would really like to get rid of my beer belly and look generally leaner and more toned. I'm also planning on running a marathon at the end of this year, so any exercises which would assist with that are also welcome.
I don't really know anything about strength training, so currently my only goal is to be able to deadlift my body weight (~83 kg) in a few months' time.
For solid endurance training, get a ruck sack and put some miles under tension down. It's somewhat lower impact by virtue of stride and body mechanics, and ruck sacks are just generally useful tools. Obviously you gotta run some to train for a marathon, but incorporate rucking into your routine as a useful training tool.
So far as lifting goes, I swear by powerlifting if you are starting from nothing. This is the routine I'm using at the minute, as somebody somewhat new to lifting myself. Compound lifts have absolutely given me a new lease on life as a desk jockey, and I swear to God they work like a charm.
For those who care for reciepts, I (260lb, 5'11", male) maxxed recently a 330lb squat, a 375lb deadlift, and a 225lb bench, all up from the empty bar in the summer of 2022. I'm up about 20 lbs from about 6 months ago, so I'm overweight to be sure, but I feel way better than I did last summer. More explosive, more flexible, much stronger, I can actually dead-man carry my wife now if need be which I couldn't say a year ago.
The site I linked has a lot of great information and basically guides new lifters through the process. Let me know if you have any questions, this forum has a lot of great knowledge hidden behind the esoteric culture war stuff and I'm sure the rest of the meat heads would gladly pitch in.
Do you have any research info on rucking as an activity as far as calories burned? I've always kind of liked it but my brain demands science.
If rucking worked, fat people would never get fat.
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